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Video is unwatchacble due to constant buffering. I can however stream 1080p youtube videos at the same time flawlessly, so I doubt it's anythng to do with my connection. It doens't reflect well on Silverlight and Microsoft media services when Microsofts own websites can't get them to work reliably.

Yet every image you ever saw on the internet that had text in it made with photoshop looked exactly the same more or less. And mac and linux distros use the same rendering technuiqes. I'm sure IE9 is almost invariably tested with regular DPI settings that you are also using. People have said, and still say, the same things about cleartype GDI rendering as opposed to non anti-aliased text of windows 98. It's not as simple a debate as saying "it looks bad to me so they should remove it".

As I understand it, VS2010 uses DirectWrite via WPF to render fonts. It doesn't however use sub-pixel positioning. It renders them in exactly the same way that GDI renders them (DirectWrite supports this as a legacy feature).

IE9 renders fonts much more like, mac osx, linux and photoshop and almost any other modern font renderer. IMHO I feel the problem is for most people is that the font rendering in IE clashed badly with font rendering in the rest of windows. When the whole system is rendered this way I don't think people would be as easily bothered by it. I've been using IE9 as my main browser for awhile and for the most part I feel mosts fonts looks better more than worse with it. Though I agree small fonts do tend to be harder to read. I'd like to see the IE team make a post about this and see how much they've thought about these issues. But over all I feel like sub-pixel positioning is the way to go in the future. There's also always going to be people who prefere the regular cleartype rendering no matter what, just as there is a fair group of people who are upset that IE9 won't render text with no anti-alias at all.